Friday, June 1, 2012

NOTE: The latest ubertooth source builds now instruct you on how to do this. You can follow their steps or use this if you like. The config changes in this tutorial are also helpful if you want non root access to your other usb devices.

I try to avoid running arbitrary software as root whenever possible. By applying this simple udev rule, you will not have to worry about running your ubertooth software with escalated privileges.

Also note, this tweak will work for all usb devices. This is helpful for me so my hcitool and hciconfig commands no longer require root.

This tutorial is for ubuntu 12.04, but will most likely work on older versions and similar distros.

To start, fire up your favorite editor and create a usb rules file in the /etc/udev/rules.d directory if id does not exist.

sudo vi /etc/udev/rules.d/45-usb.rules

Add this single line to the file. Replace USER_NAME with your users name. In ubuntu, each user has a group named after them, so this may differ on non ubuntu systems.